Revolutions need an armed wing, and the idealistic patriots who were conspiring to overthrow the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies-as Southern Italy and Sicily were called-and unite it with the rest of Italy, formed an alliance with violent criminals whom they used as revolutionary muscle. Put very briefly, in Southern Italy il Risorgimento was much more of a revolution and was more violent than it was in the rest of the country. The long process leading up to Italian unification- il Risorgimento-is really the key explanation of the emergence of the mafias. Italy only became one country formally in 1861.
Their origins are tied very closely to the emergence of Italy as a unified state.
As I say in my book Mafia Brotherhoods, Italy doesn’t just have a mafia, it has a criminal ecosystem in which existing mafias evolve and new ones come into being.
Those are the three major ones, although there are smaller ones too. The Camorra is different in that it’s a catch-all term for a much less centrally coordinated archipelago of gangs that range from city drug dealers to clans that look much more like the Sicilian mafia, like the Casalesi-who threatened to kill the journalist Roberto Saviano. The easiest way to define a mafia is as a freemasonry of criminals-it’s the freemasons for murderers-and that’s what Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta are. Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta are quite similar. There are three powerful mafias in Italy: Cosa Nostra, or the Sicilian mafia as it is known today the ’ndrangheta of Calabria in the far south of the country, and the Camorra in the Naples and Campania region.
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